Best selling cameras in Japan for 2013 and the future of the industry according to one financial analyst

BCNRanking published their 2013 rankings the for the best selling DSLR and mirrorless cameras in Japan:

The New York Times published a controversial article yesterday on the future of the camera industry: mirrorless products may not have been the silver bullet solution everybody has hoped for. According to Credit Suisse imaging analyst Yu Yoshida only Canon, Nikon and Sony are likely to survive in the future:

"If you look mid-to-long term, digital camera makers are slipping and the market is becoming an oligopoly. Only those who have a strong brand and are competitive on price will last - and only Canon, Nikon and Sony fulfil that criteria."

Fujifilm market shares are nowhere to be seen. Their strategy to switch to digital and piss off film consumers with price raises is stupid.

They used to make much higher margin with film than digital, and it will continue to be so. Nowadays, digital camera are like smartphone : only 2 will survive (BTW, the diagrams show market share : what about profit share? I am quite a few camera makers are loosing money).

Think about the huge engineering effort it costs the digital camera makers to reach an acceptable yield producing digital chip and sensors : a single dust during the manufacturing process and the Integrated Circuit is going to the trash.

Film is still sooo much easier to design (manufacturing complexity is basically the same as in the 80’s **) and produce (who ever returned a film roll to the shop because there what a “dead pixel”?), and margin is WAY higher. But d*mned Fuji got the crazy idea that they will have huge benefits with digital.

** Ilford is publicly describing the “Pan 100” and “Pan 400” as the same emulsion as the FP4 and the HP5 of the 1980’s (30 years ago now!)
Yet Ilford is not ashamed to ask 3-4 euros per roll !!
Same with Fuji Neopan 100 SS.

Another way to see it :
– an integrated circuit is a stack of about 50 complicatedly connected layers of metal and silicon. Miss one step and the circuit is as dead as brick.
– a film roll is : between 3 (B&W) to 10 (color) layers of dump chemical pasta on a gelatine or cellulose substrate.

preston

If selling film and film cameras was profitable then they’d do it. They are not ceasing production of most films because they’re too profitable and just can’t handle it. You obviously don’t represent a popular opinion in thinking they should have focused on film rather than digital.

chk

how did you correlated the two tables?
The % of each product is relative to the table only, to correlate the results you should also know how much each table total weights.
I mean, the “100%” of dslr table can be the 80% of the total sale between dslr and mirrorless (for instance)

Jeff Curtner

The original BCN article has additional information besides the two tables.